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The Loop

Jason Day: Momentum, confidence and a potential $10 million reward

September 02, 2015

Stories of interest you might have missed…

Jason Day, with three victories in his last four starts, is as confident as a golfer is allowed to get and at a time when the monetary stakes have never been higher. “The hottest golfer on the planet is hoping to ride his momentum all the way to FedExCup glory and a $10 million payday to end his season,” Darren Walton writes in the Sydney Morning Herald. “‘I have this great momentum going into next week to a course I absolutely love,’ he said. ‘I'm definitely by far playing the best golf of my life. Mechanically nothing has changed. Just the synergy between my golf swing right now and what I've done with my body is working. I'm hitting it a long, long way. I feel like the accuracy has pulled in.’”

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US PGA TOUR

Yardage book are an invaluable tool on which tour players rely, and in this story Michael Whitmer of the Boston Globe examines their beginnings, how they’re produced, and how and why the players use them. “Using lasers and GPS equipment that can record precise distances to less than one inch, [Mark] Long spends hours walking a golf course and enters all kinds of yardage, elevation, and descriptive data, making special note of exactly what golfers and caddies want: How many yards to clear that bunker? What’s the expected fairway run-out? Where’s the preferred line for a tee shot on a certain hole?”

“Professional golfers face hundreds of decisions throughout each round. Do they hit a driver or iron? Go for the par-5 in two or lay up? Putt from off the green or chip? But nothing Freddie Jacobson did during his 20-plus years of playing professionally — the last 13 on the PGA Tour — could prepare him for a decision he and wife Erika had to make after their youngest child, 7-year-old Max, was diagnosed with a heart defect earlier this year.” Craig Dolch at TCPalm has the story on Max and the open-heart surgery that repaired his heart.

“Tiger Woods isn't the only great golfer trying to solve the riddle of a hard sport he once made seem so easy,” Bill Fields writes at ESPNW. “Yani Tseng is also trying to manufacture a turnaround, and over the weekend in Alabama, at a tournament sponsored by a tire company, her comeback from a mysterious fall from the top gained some important traction. Tseng didn't win the Yokohama Tire LPGA Classic, but by finishing in a tie for second, she made her largest stride yet toward rediscovering the skills that shot her to the zenith of the women's game.”